


in the night kitchen

by amberwing



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Anxiety, Character Study, Depression, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Stress Baking, soriku if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-12-17 05:49:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21049337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amberwing/pseuds/amberwing
Summary: Axel doesn’t get frustrated with him, at least. He’s a good liar and a good listener, and surprisingly patient with Sora. Sora doesn’t know why, suspects it’s something to do with Roxas, and can’t bring himself to ask if that’s the truth. That’s a whole other can of worms. Jumbo can.“It’s kinda early for games,” Axel replies easily. His too-long fingers pluck another strawberry from the bowl, dancing it idly across his knuckles like a coin; his other hand drums a frenetic rhythm on the tabletop. “Will I get a prize for guessing right?”





	in the night kitchen

**Author's Note:**

> Just a couple of dudes talking about death. Takes place sometime during kh3, probably earlier rather than later. A prompt that [Ilien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/llien/pseuds/llien) graciously let me play with.

This isn’t the first time Axel has found him in the kitchen at 3 AM, and it certainly won’t be the last. They’ve come to a kind of unspoken understanding; Sora can’t sleep, so he cooks. Axel can’t sleep, so he keeps Sora company. The Mysterious Tower is—surprise, surprise— _ mysterious _ in its ability to create numerous new and specialized kitchens for Sora to discover, depending on the upset of the night, and equally good at helping Axel find him in them.

Tonight, it has a perpetually chilled marble slab, because Sora needs to do something complicated and fussy to remind himself that he isn’t  _ stupid  _ (he is). Tempering chocolate wasn’t what he’d been thinking about as he slouched down the stairs—he hadn’t been thinking about much of anything except how fucking mad he was, honestly—but, when he turned into a room and found the kitchen, its countertops brimming with half-spilled bags of chocolate feves stamped with delicate fleur-de-lys; balloon whisks, offset spatulas, silicone moulds; and mounds of too-perfectly red strawberries? Yeah, he’d temper chocolate. Why the hell not.

He’s halfway through melting the feves over a bain-marie when Axel’s head pokes through the doorway, nostrils flared. Sora’s hands are full, so he just nods to him, and Axel nods back. It’s been a while since Axel joined them, but he still moves with a stray cat wariness to him that Sora recognizes but doesn’t acknowledge. He sticks to the edges of rooms, one foot in whatever shadow is closest, like that’ll give him a faster getaway into a Corridor if need be. He always keeps the exit in view.

Riku’s like that, too. Even now. So Sora knows what to look for, and how not to mention it.

Seeing Axel out of the black coat is still a little weird, because it makes him look—well, like a normal guy. Admittedly an extremely tall and gangly one, the tower-provided pajama pants  _ still _ showing too much of his pale ankles, but just… a dude.

Sora doesn’t watch him drift around the perimeter of the little kitchen, instead keeping his eye on the thermometer in the melting chocolate, but he hears him opening cabinets and drawers, humming occasionally to himself. Just as the chocolate reaches the right temp, Axel slings himself onto one of the barstools across from him, strawberries piled high in a bowl, fingers already stained red. He watches in silence, biting berries off their stems with idle interest, as Sora pours a good amount of liquid chocolate onto the slab and starts tempering.

The sound of the offset spatula against the marble, metal on stone, should be soothing—but it reminds him too much of fighting now. His grimace must be showing, because Axel eventually drawls, “What’s so bad that chocolate’s not fixing it?”

And that’s an offering. Sora knows it. He tests the temperature silently, bulb of the thermometer tapping against the marble through thick waves of cooling chocolate. Not quite cool enough. The spatula scrapes back into it and makes him wince, but he doesn’t stop.

“I’m—“ And he stops himself from saying ‘fine’, because Axel is the best liar of them all and Sora is the worst, so it’s kind of pointless. “Just tired. Or something.”

Axel bites another strawberry and chews, slowly. The stem gets tossed over his shoulder to the floor. “What’d he do this time?”

It isn’t fair, Sora thinks, that everyone seems to know exactly what he’s feeling, what’s bothering him, when he doesn’t. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t he have a better idea of who he is by now?

“Which he?” he replies, trying for easy as he tests the chocolate again. He’s not lying; he’s being—what’s the word?  _ Coy _ . It’s funny how—how simple it is to listen to other people’s problems when it’s so difficult to dissect his own. Sora knows in his heart what’s bothering him, but it’s another thing entirely to come up with the right words for it, things that will make sense when he speaks.

Axel doesn’t get frustrated with him, at least. He’s a good liar and a good listener, and surprisingly patient with Sora. Sora doesn’t know why, suspects it’s something to do with Roxas, and can’t bring himself to ask if that’s the truth. That’s a whole other can of worms. Jumbo can.

“It’s kinda early for games,” Axel replies easily. His too-long fingers pluck another strawberry from the bowl, dancing it idly across his knuckles like a coin; his other hand drums a frenetic rhythm on the tabletop. “Will I get a prize for guessing right?”

Sora can’t help but laugh, just a tiny bit through his nose. He scrapes the chocolate off the slab in thick sheets on the spatula, adding it back to the warmed remains in the pot. “Do I look like a gashapon machine?”

Axel’s grin is fleeting and sharp. He leans back, tapping the berry against his lips in mock-contemplation. He has a thin, near-lipless face; the berry juice makes his mouth look weirdly garish, like someone cut him open so he could speak. Sora forces himself to look back into the safety of the chocolate, before his mind can start providing blood. “Everybody’ll spit  _ something _ out with the right leverage. But hey, it’s none of my business. I’m just here for whatever it is you’re making!”

“Chocolate-covered strawberries,” Sora replies mechanically, stirring. Don’t look up, not yet, wait for the images to leave. “Pass those over?”

Axel does so, wordlessly, and Sora trades him the offset spatula. The chocolate is hardening in shiny, crisply tempered waves atop the metal already; he’s so tired that the success doesn’t really register.

He’s got a parchment-covered baking tray ready already, and pulls it over before the first berry gets dipped. Red into rich brown, with the little green crown of the stem still visible. Little Chef has tried, in his wordless way, to demonstrate the power of plating and display with food, but Sora’s still not super great with it. But it’s hard to mess up something as simple as a strawberry.

“Riku’s being—I don’t know,” he says at last, four strawberries in. The first one is just starting to set, its shell dark and shiny. “Ever since—“

He doesn’t know how to say it. Ever since  _ that _ . The dive, the resurfacing. The time in between that Sora doesn’t—doesn’t really remember all that well, except in flickers of deja vu, in moments where he’s somewhere  _ else _ , comes back gasping and disoriented, Riku’s hands on his shoulders like he’s afraid Sora’s going to disappear.

Which, well. He can’t say for certain that he won’t.

It’s kind of funny—ironic? is that the right word?—that all this time, Sora’s been looking for Riku, and when he finally found him,  _ Sora _ was the one in danger of being lost.

Axel doesn’t say anything. Sora dips another berry, and gestures to the mostly-ready first one. From his peripheral vision, the spidery fingers snatch it away, leaving a ring of half-set chocolate on the parchment.

“It’s like he’s scared for me, all the time.”

“Shouldn’t he be?” Axel asks, his voice muffled against the spatula as he licks it. There’s no malice in his voice, but it doesn’t stop Sora’s shoulders from tensing up around his ears. “Shouldn’t  _ you _ be?”

“No,” he snaps. “I’m not.”

Axel makes a noncommittal sound through a mouthful of something. Sora keeps dipping strawberries, maybe a little too fast; he’s wasting chocolate. “Gotta tell me the secret sometime, ‘cause I’m sure fucking terrified.”

Sora’s shoulders hunch even more without his asking. “Sorry,” he mumbles, and taps excess chocolate off a berry. “It just feels like I keep taking one step forward and two back. I don’t know if I could even defeat  _ Ansem _ now, and it’s been what—two years? Three? So maybe Riku’s right.”

“About…?”

“Taking it easy.  _ Waiting _ . No ‘taking unnecessary risks’,” he pantomimes in his best Riku voice. “Even though he’s the one who—“ He stops himself. Axel doesn’t need to hear that same old story. He was  _ there _ , after all. He (allegedly, since Sora was asleep for this whole mess) was the one who’d saved the day. He was there when Riku nearly died, too. “I feel really useless.”

“You kinda  _ are _ right now,” Axel says thoughtfully, and Sora glances up at him. Waiting for the catch. There’s always a catch with Axel—some trapdoor about to be sprung out from under you, a spider pulling you down.

But he doesn’t follow that with anything, just pops another strawberry into his mouth and stares, challenging. But—and Sora has to try not to rise to the bait, has to struggle to keep his mouth thin and unmoving—there isn’t anything to challenge. He and Riku are right. He’s a burden.

(He knows he’s being melodramatic, knows that Riku would never think that of him—that Riku’s concern and caution are entirely justified, given Sora’s track record—but he feels very. Hollow. And believing in things is hard when there’s nothing to rest the weight of faith atop, just an empty space.)

“Guess so,” he says at last, and dips the last strawberry. Now that there’s no more berries to busy himself with, his hands start trembling. He grabs the edge of the marble to still them.

“Here’s the thing,” Axel says at last. He starts to fold his hands under his chin, but catches sight of some stray chocolate on his knuckle and pauses to suck it clean. “You’re taking it too personally.”

How is it  _ not _ personal? “You don’t need to try and make me feel better,” Sora tells him shortly, snatching his hands away from the marble to grab the bain-marie. “If that’s even what you’re doing.”

As he turns away to pour out the still-warm water—autopiloting, gotta keep moving or he’ll do something stupid—and Axel gives the longest, most dramatic sigh Sora’s ever heard. “Just listen for a minute, won’t you?”

He really doesn’t want to. But the other option is to go back to his room, where he’ll be lying in bed with these exact same thoughts. Axel waits for him to reply, and eventually seems to take it as an okay to keep going.

“You  _ are _ in deep right now,” he drawls. Sora grimaces into the fridge, finds the milk, pours a judicious glug into the still-chocolate-coated pot. “And as much as that sucks, you know what would suck more?”

Sora can’t think of many things that would. He doesn’t say anything.

“You  _ dying _ . You’re not a Nobody. You won’t miraculously come back to life. Dead’s  _ dead _ .”

“I know what dying is,” Sora replies, and turns back to him to place the pot back on the burner a little too hard. The clang of steel against the stovetop draws a wince out of him. It’s not like he hasn’t already… died once already, but he doesn’t want to think about that, because that reminds him of Roxas, and Kairi, and the long, sleep-dark gap where Something Happened that Riku won’t talk to him about.

Sora is tired. It’s easier when he’s fighting, because at least then he can feel like he’s changing something, anything—for someone out there, if not himself.

Axel doesn’t budge. His hands weave together, wrists braced against the counter as his fingertips tap intricate morse code against one another.

“Congratulations,” he replies dryly. “So—think of it like this. Pros and cons. Pros to staying out of trouble until you’ve recovered? You live! Hooray! Cons…?” He taps his chin, free hand flicking fingers up one by one. “Boredom, endless varieties of guilt, self-loathing—“

“Fuck off,” Sora tells him, without venom. “I know, okay?”

“You just don’t know how to deal,” Axel finishes for him, and reaches to light the burner, fire springing from his extended fingertip in a small, teasing lick. “And that’s fine. Nobody does—not well, anyway.”

Sora lowers the flame with the dial to a mere flicker, stares into the milk like that’ll make it simmer faster. “I just miss him,” he says, and doesn’t really know how to explain the jump, from impatience to fear to whatever this is, this hollow ache. “I hate that everybody’s finally working together... except me.”

Sora tries not to let Axel’s silence crank his anxiety up any further, with only mild success. The milk begins to steam, and he fumbles for a wooden spoon to stir. Chocolate melts into the pale froth of it in rich curlicues.

“Given my experience with emotions originate from approximately 6 months ago,” Axel says wryly, “take this with a considerable grain of salt, but. I’m pretty sure we all miss you too.”

Sora doesn’t know how to respond to that, not without crying or something, and he has absolutely  _ no _ idea how Axel would react if he just. Burst into tears. Probably not well. So he just stirs until it’s all incorporated into a creamy brown, finds some mugs, and pours roughly equal measures for them both. He manages to spill only a little bit over his fingers, but he’s been burned too many times to feel it anymore; it barely tickles, these days, even as the skin turns red.

Axel watches him, but doesn’t say anything, and that—that’s a sort of kindness, the sort that Sora wants to gather it up and surround himself with it like a cocoon: no judgment, no worry, just acceptance.

“Thanks,” Sora says, and slides the hot chocolate over.

Axel’s hands wrap around it like a raccoon with an apple. He leans down and takes a slurp without lifting the cup, then smacks his lips in appreciation. “No need to thank me.” His eyes flick up, one eyebrow arched. There’s hot chocolate foam on his upper lip. “Anyway, bribery will get you everywhere.”

“Is that a fact? Can I blame you if it stops working?”

“It  _ never _ fails,” Axel pronounces, with gravity worthy of Master Yen Sid. “And no, I’ll wet-willy you if you even dare.”

  
  



End file.
